Cast a cold eye
On life, on death
Horseman, pass by! –epitaph: W. B. Yeats
Let’s you and I begin today, the 30th of September, a series of three essays in which we cast a cold eye, as poet W. B. Yeats would put it, on the Papal letter of mid-summer 2024 urging the cultivation of seminarians’ interest in literature.[1] For what better day to do so than the feast day of Bible translator, St. Jerome of Stridon, whose remarkable life in scrolls and primitive inks was marked by a life-changing dream antithetical to the spirit of Francis’ letter. One wherein he got, instead, this message from God: Steer clear of secular literature. Then, too, by beginning today our three-essay, cold-eyed deconstruction of the Francis letter/treatise on the value of fiction and poetry, we do so in the calendar vicinity of the late-August feast day of Augustine, author of The Confessions, and of the late-July feast day of Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. These two temporal proximities are also propitious in as much as both these saints, like Jerome, came fully to their Savior only after shaking themselves free of the shackles that bound them to Literature (in Loyola’s case)[2] and to Rhetoric and Lit (in Augustine’s case)[3].
I shall have more to say about Augustine, Loyola, and Yeats, in my upcoming essays. And more too to say about the Francis letter’s Vatican-deep-state character. However, for today it’s enough for us to learn that in the history of the Church prominent souls such as Jerome have gone to heaven not by embracing literary texts and culture, but by forsaking them. Consider his story:
About Jerome (342-420 AD) and his deep involvements with the literary life and culture of his time until he forsook them, we know the following: that he was born into a financially substantial household on the Empire’s Adriatic margins some thirty years after the Edict of Milan had made Christianity a tolerated religion. Thus, his parents had a need to prepare him for successful citizenship in both this world and the next. And that’s what they apparently did, seeing to his rearing in the Christian faith and, to the extent that it was locally available to them, in the liberalia studia program (grammar, rhetoric, and law/philosophy) that was thought to be the guarantor of non-military, career success in those days. About his earliest training, we know this: that howsoever little sophisticated the schoolmasters of his childhood, and howsoever bullying their tutelary practices, the boy Jerome came to know the verses of Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, and Lucan, for it was in texts such as theirs that the student of his day was required to find and parse exemplary grammatical and rhetorical figures. Next, the yet still unbaptized Jerome was sent at age twelve to Rome for the greater educational resources of that imperial city. There, under the direction of the learned grammarian Donatus, he came to know yet more Latin texts, as well as to know them with greater intimacy. In particular, he developed a fondness for the grim sententiousness of the rhetorician and philosopher Cicero. Further, it was there too, while in Rome, that he started to assemble the personal library that became for a time his greatest material treasure.
However, while in Rome, he also became more serious about his religious faith—distinguishable from the literary faith impressed upon him by his education, namely, the belief that the operatic paragraphs and verses of the canonical pagan texts stored in his library and circulating in his head were to be, going forward in his life, his best bet. And, thus, with friends of his he took to frequenting the catacombs of a Sunday, and there, in those tunnels’ darkness and surrounded by the remains of the many Christian and Jewish souls buried there, he one day got the scare of his life that would thereafter make him preeminently and radically a pursuer of post-life salvation. In the preface to his Commentary on Ezekiel, a work written some forty years after the scare, he recounted the incident. For that narrative’s display of Jerome’s facility with pagan as well as Scriptural texts, and his recourse to both when he wanted to make sense of things, I quote it:
Often we would enter those crypts which have been hollowed out of the depths of the earth, and which, along the walls on either side of the passages, contain the bodies of buried people. Everything was so dark that the Prophet’s saying, ‘Let them go down alive to the underworld’ (Ps. 55: 15) seemed almost to have been fulfilled. Here and there a ray of light, admitted from above, relieved the horror of blackness, yet in such a way that you imagined that it was not so much a window as a funnel pierced by the light itself as it descended. Then we would walk back with feet feeling our way, wrapped in ‘unseeing night’ (Seneca the Younger, Thyestes, 668: “nocte caeca”), with Virgil’s line recurring to us: ‘Everywhere the terror’ in our hearts, ‘and silence itself at the same time’ terrifying us (Aeneid, Bk. 2, 1, 755: “Terror ubique animos, simul ipsa silentia terrent”).[4]
Shortly after this experience, which Jerome never imagined as having implications for his literary passions, he was baptized (by Pope Liberius, say some), and shortly after that, he and one of his classmates set out with their scholarly credentials in hand to contemporary Trier in then Gaul, hoping to secure positions in the imperial bureaucracy. They got the jobs they were looking for, and, no doubt, they might have settled in for a lifetime in the Empire’s government bureaucracy had not Jerome, ever in pursuit of new texts for his library, came across some Christian writings that further inflamed his religious spirit. They were all about the then spreading practice in Christian communities of avowed asceticism. Jerome was entirely set on fire by what he read of this radical brand of Christian commitment, and thereafter, he was no longer a seeker after professional and scholarly distinction, but, instead, a seeker after the spiritual perfection that is a Christian ascetic’s loftiest aspiration. In this pursuit, he would leave Trier, go to northern Italy, then next to Aquileia (in the Adriatic region), to Antioch (contemporary Syria), to Constantinople, to Rome and then, lastly, to Bethlehem where he would make his largest contribution to Christianity, his Hebrew-consulted, Latin translation of the Bible.
Very likely on an earlier of those journeys, he had the dream that is our main concern today. That would be the one in which he was scolded by God for his continued fascination with pagan authors. In a letter many years later to a female disciple of his, he recounted the dream this way:
Many years ago, when for the kingdom of heaven’s sake I had cut myself off from home, parents, sister, relations, and — harder still — from the dainty food to which I had been accustomed; and when I was on my way to Jerusalem to wage my warfare, I still could not bring myself to forego the library which I had formed for myself at Rome with great care and toil. And so, miserable man that I was, I would fast only that I might afterwards read Cicero. After many nights spent in vigil, after floods of tears called from my inmost heart, after the recollection of my past sins, I would once more take up Plautus. And when at times I returned to my right mind, and began to read the prophets, their style seemed rude and repellent. I failed to see the light with my blinded eyes; but I attributed the fault not to them, but to the sun.
While the old serpent was thus making me his plaything, about the middle of Lent a deep-seated fever fell upon my weakened body, and while it destroyed my rest completely — the story seems hardly credible — it so wasted my unhappy frame that scarcely anything was left of me but skin and bone. Meantime preparations for my funeral went on; my body grew gradually colder, and the warmth of life lingered only in my throbbing breast. Suddenly I was caught up in the spirit and dragged before the judgment seat of the Judge; and here the light was so bright, and those who stood around were so radiant, that I cast myself upon the ground and did not dare to look up. Asked who and what I was I replied: I am a Christian. But He who presided said: You lie. You are a follower of Cicero and not of Christ. For ‘where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’ (Mt. 6:21). Instantly I became dumb, and amid the strokes of the lash — for He had ordered me to be scourged — I was tortured more severely still by the fire of conscience, considering with myself that verse, “In the grave who shall give you thanks?” Yet for all that I began to cry and to bewail myself, saying: Have mercy upon me, O Lord: have mercy upon me. Amid the sound of the scourges this cry still made itself heard. At last the bystanders, falling down before the knees of Him who presided, prayed that He would have pity on my youth, and that He would give me space to repent of my error. He might still, they urged, inflict torture on me, should I ever again read the works of the Gentiles.
Under the stress of that awful moment I should have been ready to make even still larger promises than these. Accordingly I made oath and called upon His name, saying: Lord, if ever again I possess worldly books, or if ever again I read such, I have denied You. Dismissed, then, on taking this oath, I returned to the upper world, and, to the surprise of all, I opened upon them eyes so drenched with tears that my distress served to convince even the incredulous. And that this was no sleep nor idle dream, such as those by which we are often mocked, I call to witness the tribunal before which I lay, and the terrible judgment which I feared. May it never, hereafter, be my lot to fall under such an inquisition! I profess that my shoulders were black and blue, that I felt the bruises long after I awoke from my sleep, and that thenceforth I read the books of God with a zeal greater than I had previously given to the books of men.[5]
Did Jerome remain good thereafter to his promise to stay away from secular texts? Truth to tell, no, he did not. To see that such is the case, one has only to read the first paragraph of his preface to his Book of Hebrew Questions, wherein he likens himself to the Latin authors Terence, Virgil, and Tully, who, in prefaces to their own works, just as he was doing, got started in their arguments by first answering charges of plagiarism.[6] And, yet still, the dream is key to understanding Jerome’s character.
I bring it up now as antidotal to Francis’s letter, which contemplates no such literary-averse strain in the Church’s cultural history, which, instead, foresees nothing but good coming out of souls’ and the Church’s engagement with secular, literary culture. That’s optimism unto Pelagianism, will say I in my future postings on this topic. Also, it betrays little awareness on the Vatican’s part of the ruinousness of contemporary literary culture. And, lastly, what to make of that anecdote in the letter wherein Francis recalls a moment in his early Jesuit career when, he, a high school literature teacher, absolved his students of their obligation to read a required text in favor of the novels they preferred? Are we reading as we read that passage something like autobiographical/auto-hagiographical construction? Yes, I will have something to say relative to that question too.
Please stay tuned.
[1] Pope Francis. “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis on the Role of Literature in Formation.” The Holy See. Dicastero per la Comunicazione – Libreria Editrice Vaticana. July 17, 2024. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2024/documents/20240717-lettera-ruolo-letteratura-formazione.html.
[2] Ignatius of Loyola. The Autobiography of Saint Ignatius, ed. By J.X.F. O’Connor (New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benzinger Bros, 1900), 24. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24534/pg24534-images.html#Page_24.
[3] Augustine. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Translated and Edited by Albert Cook Outler (Mineola: Dover Publications), p. 150.
[4] Jerome, Commentarius in Ezzechielem (c. 40, v. 5-13), qtd. in “St. Jerome as a Kid in the Catacombs,” Aliens in this World, Dec. 10, 2023, https://suburbanbanshee.wordpress.com/2023/12/10/st-jerome-in-the-catacombs/.
[5] Jerome of Stridon, “Letter 22: To Eustochium,” New Advent. Original source: Trans. by W.H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W.G. Martley in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 6. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893.). https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001022.htm
[6] Jerome of Stridon, “Preface” to the Book of Hebrew Questions, qtd. in Jerome by Stefan Rebenich (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 94.
